Complement Clause with the Verb Know : You as "Object of Conceptualiation" or "Subject of Conceptualization"?

Abstract

This paper examines the cases where complement clauses with the verb know have the second person as their sentence subject. With the verb know, which is one of the factive predicates, truth of complements is generally presupposed (Kiparsky & Kiparsky, 1970), and even when the main clauses are negated the complements are not. Langacker sheds some light on this specific feature of factivity by presupposing two layers of conceptualization. In case of the verb know, if the main clauses are negated the complements are not because the proposition is “independently accessible to the speaker and accepted as being valid” (Langacker,2002, pp. 203-204).When the sentence subject is you, however, there are anomalous cases where the propositions do not stay as valid if the main clauses are negated. Thus, this paper proposes two types of complement clauses with the verb know: type A in which factivity is kept intact; type B in which the feature of factivity is lost. The objective of this paper is to elucidate how such a difference in factivity is brought about. Each type is explicated based on the intersubjective view and the construal configuration of Verhagen (2005, 2007). This paper argues that type A represents the cases where the second person’s cognitive state is profiled as the object of conceptualization at the objective level; type B, on the other hand, represents the cases that profile the coordination relation between the speaker and the hearer, with respect to the same object of conceptualization.